


Something Just Broke

by efifeadams (brooklynisosm)



Series: Assassins- The Death of Innocence and Hope [2]
Category: Assassins - Sondheim/Weidman
Genre: Gen, JFK assassination, Song Lyrics, Tragedy, kind of?, not fun, the other side of the coin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:05:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8866945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brooklynisosm/pseuds/efifeadams
Summary: November 22nd, 1963, is a normal day until it isn't. Assassination hurts people. ((inspired by the song Something Just Broke))(((companion work to The Death of Innocence and Hope though you don't need to read it to understand this because this is just about the JFK assassination)))((((writing this fucked me up))))





	

November 22nd, 1963 is an ordinary day until it isn’t. 

* * *

Betty is out in the yard, taking down the bed sheets. She’s got to get them inside before it rains, or hanging them out to dry wouldn’t have been very productive. Betty likes things to be productive, structured. Her ducks all in a row, as they say.

Lizzie wet the bed again (how many times has that happened in the last month?) and it’s a bit frustrating now that winter is on the way because soon Betty will hang the sheets up and they’ll freeze, crumpled into strange shapes by the wind. 

She’s thinking about how she really ought to get Lizzie to go to the bathroom before bed when the screen door slams open next door, and her neighbor runs out onto his back porch. 

Betty looks up through the slats of the white picket fence. 

“The president’s been shot!” her neighbor yells across the fence. “The president’s been shot!.” 

It hits her like a sneaker wave at the beach, knocks the air out of her. The sheet, halfway folded in her hands, falls into the grass. 

_ The president’s been shot. _

Betty can’t cry. She just stands there staring at the sheet. Lizzie’s sheet.  _ The President’s been shot.  _ Everyone these days thinks the world is ending, but now, Betty thinks, it really is. This can’t be real. She’s seeing the sheet but she’s also seeing herself seeing the sheet. Like she’s out of her body. It isn’t real. But it is. 

Something just broke. 

* * *

Lois Bucket is correcting the exams. Her students got off just a few minutes ago; Thanksgiving Break is next week and she has a while before it needs to be done, but she likes to finish the grading the day the test is taken. She’ll be going home for Thanksgiving this year to the constant nagging of her mother to get married and she’d rather have all her work done before she goes to that.

She’s taking the cap off her red pen once again when Billy runs in. 

“Hello, Billy,” Lois says, then sees his face. He’s crying, his eyes red and expression horrified. Billy has never cried at school, not even through all the injuries he manages to sustain on the playground. “What’s happened?” 

“Miss Bucket-” Billy says, choking on tears. “The President’s been shot.” 

“What?” Lois puts her pen down on her desk, stands up, and then sits again. “Are you sure?” 

“They just said it on the radio, Miss.” 

“Oh, my God.” Lois covers her mouth with her hand. “Oh, my-” 

There’s a strange rushing noise inside her head. Her eyes burn and the next thing she knows, tears are running down her cheeks. 

She tries to say something to Billy but she can’t. It’s like when she heard that her dad died. Except this is the President. Lois doesn’t know which is worse. 

* * *

Robert Oswald is at lunch when he hears. The diner is nice. It has good customer service. He’s sitting there eating a turkey sandwich on rye bread with some of his buddies from work when the radio gets strangely quiet and then,

“The latest news from Dallas say that President John F. Kennedy has been taken to the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Meanwhile, the police have apprehended a possible suspect for the assassination- Lee Harvey Oswald-” 

“Hey Rob, isn’t that your brother?” his friend Paul says. 

The table goes silent, everyone staring at him. The entire restaurant has frozen in shock of the news. A waitress drops a tray, her face crumpling into a sob as she cries, “Oh my God!”. Robert watches in fascination as the tray falls, the glassware shattering on the ground. It all seems to happen in slow motion. 

“No,” he says. Then he takes his coat from the back of the chair and walks to the door. 

“Where are you going?” Paul says. 

“I don’t know,” Robert says. 

The bell of the door dings and he steps out into the street. It’s abandoned. The world is quiet, as if it has just broken. 

There’s a bus stop nearby. He walks there, listening for any sound. When he gets to the terminal, he sits down and puts his head in his hands.  _ Oh, my God, , God, Lee,  _ he thinks.  _ Lee, Lee, Lee.  _

* * *

Harold is up near the ridge, plowing. Being a farmer is stressful- there’s a lot of responsibility that goes into it- but plowing is the one thing that he’s always found relaxing, and he doesn’t know why.

It hasn’t been a great year. The crops are failing, or at least enough that him and his wife Stacey can’t be supported with just the profits from the market. Stacey is a waitress at a diner now, and it’s hard not having her around. They’ve been married for a long time and Harold is used to her constant presence. 

He’s snapped out of his thoughts when he notices a dot on the horizon, moving fast towards him. He stops the plow to take a better look, and realizes it’s Stacey, still in her waitress uniform. Maybe she’s come home early to surprise him? But no, as she nears him, he realizes that she’s crying, mascara staining her cheeks. 

“Stacey?” Harold says. 

“Harold- I was at work- I heard-” she’s practically in hysterics. “Harold, I heard- the President’s been shot!” 

Harold gets down from the plow. “Stace,” he says, “Take a deep breath.”

She takes his hands. “You don’t understand! Kennedy’s been shot, Harold!” 

Harold feels like he does when he’s plowing. Like he’s not really inhabiting himself, just floating over all of it with a deadly calm. He can see Stacey’s grief, and knows he should feel it too, break down with her, but he can’t. He’s forgotten how. It’s like the news has shocked all the feelings out of him. 

So he just wraps Stacey in his arms and they stand there up near the ridge next to the plow as she cries into his flannel shirt and he strokes her hair and says over and over, “It’ll be okay, we’re okay, we’re okay,” and it feels like the world has just broken. 

* * *

Marguerite Oswald has already been crying. Kennedy’s a good president- she likes him- and how awful is this, how terrible... Lee’s living in Dallas; the last time she spoke with him, at least, he’d said we’re doing fine, mom and now she’s worrying about him all over again. And Jacqueline Kennedy had looked so horrified on the TV… Marguerite can’t handle it.

She’s anxiously cleaning, scrubbing the kitchen floor, when his name comes over the radio. 

“The police have apprehended a suspect- Lee Harvey Oswald-” 

Marguerite screams and flinches back as if the radio burned her. 

Different Lee Harvey Oswald, she thinks. There must be more than one Lee Harvey Oswald in the world. Not my Lee. Not mine. 

Marguerite wraps her arms around her knees and sits there on the kitchen floor for what seems like ages, listening to the tinny radio announcer’s voice. The President is rallying. The President is sinking. Nausea rises up inside her; she pushes it down. 

_ The President is dead.  _

The phone is ringing. She lets it until it stops. 

A few minutes later, it starts ringing again. 

Finally, she picks herself up from the floor and answers the phone. 

It’s Robert. He says, “Mother,” and then she starts to sob.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” she says. 

“Yes,” Robert says. He sounds distraught. Her middle son has never been one to cry much, yet now Marguerite hears the tears in his voice. 

“Not Lee,” she says. “Not my baby- he wouldn’t do this, he would never do something like this-” 

“I didn’t think he would either,” Robert says. “But I guess we didn’t know him as well as we thought we did.” 

* * *

Matthias has been sick for weeks. He didn’t want to come into work today, didn’t want to go through another day of the most stressful job he can imagine, but he had to. So yeah, this morning he was wishing that work would close for some reason, but he didn’t think it would ever happen. This is the New York Stock Exchange. It doesn’t close for anything.

_ The President is dead.  _

Now he feels weirdly guilty, like it’s his fault. Just for wanting work to close. He got back to his apartment okay, even though the whole city has gotten out of whack, like there was an earthquake instead of an assassination. 

He lays in his bed. He can remember exactly where he was right when the announcement came over the loudspeaker that John F. Kennedy was shot (right in the middle of the action, people talking loud and fast all around him), and how the entire hall got completely silent like everyone had simultaneously decided to hold their breath. 

Matthias isn’t an easily scared man, but he’s scared now. He’s scared and sick and the Earth is spinning the wrong way. 

He falls asleep. The next morning all he can remember is that yesterday was a Friday. 

* * *

Marina hits the water like it’s solid ground, a full-body punch by someone who wants to hurt her. The impact pushes the air out of her lungs, whatever idea of a scream that had formed in her throat torn out. Every bone in her body breaks, and then she sinks with a furious velocity, until it becomes less furious and mellows into a dull, sinking ache.

She breathes in deep, and water fills her lungs, inflates them with the wrong thing. Everything is cold around her, thousands of icy fingers clawing at her skin, thousands of tiny, sharp, icicle teeth ready to sink into her bruised flesh and take a bite. 

That is what it feels like when Marina hears. 

In all reality, she’s in the hall of Ruth’s house when the phone rings. Ruth has already been watching the news and crying, but since Marina can’t speak English, she has no idea what’s going on, and Ruth doesn’t seem to be able to tell her. So she goes to the phone unprepared 

When she picks up, it’s Alek, and he speaks to her in panicked Russian, every few words slipping into English as he does when he’s upset. And at first she’s relieved to know where he is; he went to work far too early this morning and left his wedding ring and a lot of money behind. But when she finally understands what he’s saying, it plunges her into the frozen lake. 

She can’t understand this. She can’t understand him. He’s always been strange, though, hasn’t he? Lee Harvey Oswald, her Alek, has something wrong with him, like his insides are constantly warring.  _ He’s sick, he’s twisted, he’s not quite a person. _ People stay away from him because he’s different- a beaten bird with a broken wing trapped underground in a colony of rats. 

Marina married him because she thought she could fix that wing, get him to fly, take her with him, but she can’t, and probably no one can. He’ll never get back to the sky, and he keeps trying to and damaging himself even more. 

And now he’s gone and killed the President of the United States. 

It’s the news that hits her, not the water, and she sinks down the floral-papered wall, clutching the receiver of the phone so tightly that she could snap it in half. 

She’s known fear before, the fear that only Alek can stir within her, but this is a new kind. This country, this country that already hates her, is coming after her. And her daughters. Because of him and the wrongness she couldn’t fix. 

“Marina,” Alek says, “It’s fine, it’s fine-” 

But she’s drowning and she can’t hear him. The only thing she can hear is the pressure in her ears, the water rushing, clawing around her throat until she stops breathing completely. 

In a fit of anger, Marina throws the receiver at the opposite wall, nearly sending the phone flying with it. _Wrong, wrong, wrong._

Alek has always been on the road to ruin. He’s too different, and now he’s broken everything. 

* * *

The thing about Kennedy’s death is that it brings people together.

It brings together rifted families. In schools, kids break down crying and their classmates all huddle around them and the entire class holds each other’s hands as they pray. Strangers make eye contact in the street and know that they have their grief, their horror, to share. A peace comes over America, a silence when everyone bows their heads and weeps together. They weep a flood of pain and that cleanses them, if only for a moment, lets them finally see the parts of the country that have been hidden for too long. 

For just one awful moment, Americans have a song to sing together again. The song of something just broke, and they all know the words, because even though everyone’s story is different, it’s all the same. And they all have this thing, this something that just woke within them, this wanting to be near others, to be held, to love, to resist this act of hatred. No one is alone. 

Except for Lee Harvey Oswald. 

He’s alone until the end. 


End file.
